oh ye multilingual and/or well-travelled folks...

[kaigou]

I know there's at least one or two Irish citizens on my flist... any chance any of you could take a gander at the name Giolla and give me some idea how it'd be pronounced? Yes, I know there are differences between modern and traditional/archaic for Scotland and Ireland and between the two countries, as well; it's modern Irish I'm curious about.

I keep thinking the 'g' is a soft-jay (like the French), and something tells me there's a funky dipthong in the -io- combination... but maybe that's just some distant memory of how it's said in the Scottish dialect. (I was raised knowing how to properly say the various family mottos, but those are all in a Scottish dialect. I can't tell you how Scottish/Irish pronounciation differs, only that I've been informed that they do. Which isn't much help when I'm trying to deduce the Irish pronounciation.)

Any help is much appreciated. Ah, the mysteries of languages! ...which reminds me, I have a chapter and a half of Mandarin to finish translating... Just what my brain needs, to decipher Mandarin while I've got Irish names bouncing in my head.

Comments

[wyvernfriend.livejournal.com]

I'd pronounce Giolla with a soft g like in Galway - Gilla, the end a little like how you'd pronounce illa in Gorilla.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

(Sorry I didn't reply sooner.)

Galway? That has a soft-g? I've always understood "soft-g" to be a "jhay"-like sound, which would make "Galway" less of the G in, like, Gorilla, and more like the G in George. Uhm. What's a hard-g? *squints*

I was thinking the "gio" part would be like george, actually, so maybe like g(zh)ee-olla, though I thought "io" would be a dipthong. Man, languages are hard!

(Though much of my curiosity was focused on how similar, or disparate, the name would sound compared to an Italian G-starting name, like Giorgio.)